on horowitz

Careerist, particularly an extreme careerist, is often used in reference to a person who employs short-term strategies of personal career advancement rather than thinking about the long-term success of an organization. I think the double linkage Horowitz refers to is the idea that language is used to advance the interests of a group of homogeneous speakers, as well as the interests of the individual. The group might use language as a political resource to demarcate itself from other groups (e.g. nation-building, claiming sovereignty/independence from another nation), or as a centripetal strategy to bring those within the group closer to each other. Both cases relating to what Horowitz calls, “political claims to ownership”. Likewise, the individual uses language as both an inclusion and exclusion tool that affirms the worth of the group to which he or she belongs, while undermining the worth of other groups.

I don’t think I quite understand what dividing up the glorification of a national language would look like, but I’ll give it a shot. If I’m way off, please call me out on it. To divide up the “glorification” might imply a scenario in which we grant the glory of a literary language to Language A, that of a political language to Language B, and that of a language used in the media to Language C. This would indeed be very problematic. Not only does this undermine the “glory” and utility of a single national language, society would become a linguistic zoo with communication bottlenecks all over the place...Unless these languages were mutually intelligible, in which case, we would have a multiglossia?

In class, we haven’t gone too much into technical linguistic components of language policy. I wonder how much the way a language actually ‘sounds’ might contribute to its perceived worth by those who do not speak the language. I know we all love urban sociology, so I’ll end my post with this example. I’ve spoken to a number of my friends, who seem to all agree that Cantonese is less pleasing to the ear than Mandarin. Granted, they didn’t comment on how this affected their perception of group worth—so my example might have no connection to our discussion of language as a symbol of group worth. However, in the U.S., many would say that a British accent automatically adds a touch of sophistication to one’s speech. In this case, the sound of a language/dialect does seem to affect the status of the group of speakers.